Wayne Williams, president of Poe Construction, conducts a tour of the dry storage area that Poe Construction was building for the UNFI grocery distribution center.
Tom O’Keefe, principal and chief executive officer of O’Keefe Development, shows a birds-eye view of the grocery distribution center the company is building and will lease to UNFI in February 2019.
The previously anonymous tenant for Centralia’s incoming grocery distribution center has finally revealed itself — United Natural Foods, Incorporated.
Developer Tom O’Keefe, CEO of O’Keefe Development, announced Wednesday that UNFI is the tenant for the company’s $100 million grocery distribution center, located in the Port of Centralia Park I.
“It’s a neat company and a neat story in terms of what they do in the community,” O’Keefe said. “... Their whole idea of delivering organic, sustainable food types is a big part of their corporate culture.”
In October 2018, UNFI acquired SUPERVALU — another food wholesaler and the original company O’Keefe began building the distribution center for — in a $2.9 billion deal. UNFI, combined with SUPERVALU, is the largest publicly-traded grocery distributor in the U.S., with expected sales of over $21 billion, according to a press release from the company.
UNFI plans to consolidate its five distribution centers in the Pacific Northwest into the one currently under construction in Centralia and one that it is expanding in Ridgefield. According to the press release from the company, once the two distribution centers are complete, UNFI plans to close its warehouses in Tacoma, Portland and Auburn.
O’Keefe said the company informed employees at the Portland and Tacoma warehouses on Tuesday.
According to O’Keefe’s contract with the tenant, UNFI will be inside the building by July. However, O’Keefe said he would like to deliver the building at the end of May or in June.
O’Keefe also said that while he previously expected UNFI to bring about 350 jobs to the area, he now believes the number will be “significantly higher than that.”
“Officially, right now, they are still pegging the number at 350 people, but they think it will be more,” O’Keefe said.
When The Chronicle asked a spokesperson for UNFI how many people the company expects to employ at the Centralia location, the spokesperson wrote back with the following statement:
“We’ve just announced our plans and have begun discussions with associates at our Portland, Tacoma, and Auburn facilities about the job opportunities and their interest in joining us in Centralia,” the statement reads. “We’re excited about our role in the Centralia community and the jobs we will bring to the area as we will need a great workforce to help operate this facility. We’ll begin the hiring process in the near future and will share details at that time. We expect to begin receiving goods later this summer and shipping to customers this fall.”
O’Keefe announced the tenant at a private reception with community members, as well as city and county officials at the grocery distribution center site. O’Keefe showed attendees aerial video footage of the distribution center and took everyone on a virtual tour of the building and site.
The project is so large that O’Keefe Development used two different contractors. O’Keefe said Poe Construction is the main contractor, building the dry warehouse and doing all of the site work. The second contractor, Bethlehem Construction, is based in Cashmere and specializes in cooler and freezer building, O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe said Centralia is a great location for the distribution center because of its proximity to Seattle and Portland.
“Those are the two markets of the Northwest that they send their cornflakes to, so that was a big part of it,” O’Keefe said. “The second part of it (is) the size of the site was great. … In first place is I gave them such a hell of a deal … for a 20-year lease with options that they would have been foolish not to do it.”
The grocery distribution center is a more than $100 million project, located at 4002 Galvin Road in Centralia. The site is approximately 1.2 million square feet on about 77 acres.
